the ‘beautiful ladies’ from a cult-like evangelical church – MASHAHER

“To them, I wasn’t being abused,” Fenner said. “I was being saved and delivered.”

Word of Faith has consistently disputed these claims. As one of the members who frequently volunteers at Trump rallies, Hannah Davies, said in a testimonial posted on the church’s website: “I want everyone to know this prayer is not abusive, no one is hit, no one is punched, no one is screamed at. This prayer is full of love and freedom.”

None of the church’s history comes up at Trump’s rallies, and the former president has never once mentioned the church the North Carolina women belong to.

The women serve as a trusted volunteer arm of the campaign’s advance team. They arrive well before the beginning of a Trump event, set up chairs in the VIP section, run the media sign-in table and disassemble the VIP section after the rally is over. Contrary to Trump’s assertion that the women attend the rallies without their spouses, in recent months their husbands have been seen distributing floor passes and policing the VIP areas.

The women and their husbands declined to be interviewed for this article. Instead, the church’s attorney, Joshua Farmer, emailed a statement from the members explaining what motivated their volunteer work for the campaign.

“God has spoken to our hearts that President Trump is the person who will lead this country in the right direction,” the statement said.

Loading

In the statement, Farmer said that his wife, Andrea Farmer, is among the volunteers. Others represent the upper echelon of the church’s hierarchy, beginning with the co-founders of the church, Jane and Sam Whaley. Robin Webster, their daughter and a longtime teacher in the church’s K-12 private school, is also a volunteer, as is the church’s associate minister, Kim Waites.

Republicans say the church constitutes a formidable voting bloc in the 10th Congressional District, which includes all of Rutherford County. During the 2020 Republican primary, the incumbent congressman, Republican Patrick McHenry, carried every precinct in the district except for the church’s home in Spindale – a likely consequence, Republicans said, of McHenry’s support for church closings during the first months of the COVID pandemic, which Word of Faith initially resisted.

During the 2022 midterm elections, several Word of Faith members donated a combined $US7,850 to the Trump-endorsed incumbent in the neighbouring 11th District, Madison Cawthorn. Cawthorn was defeated in his primary, but church members had worked hard to distribute his campaign literature according to the former state representative of the area, Mike Hager.

“I’ll say that for Word of Faith,” Hager said in an interview. “They’re very involved and they make themselves heard.”

Loading

This past July, several Word of Faith members hosted a fundraiser for Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson of North Carolina, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, at the house of a church member, David Caulder, a prominent real estate agent in the area. CNN has reported that Robinson, a vocal opponent of gay rights and abortion under any circumstances, frequented adult video stores throughout the 1990s and referred to himself on message boards as “Black Nazi”, both of which his campaign has vehemently denied.

Among the “co-chairs & hosts” listed on the fundraising event’s invitation was Whaley, the church’s co-founder.

The Trump campaign did not respond to questions about the Word of Faith members for this article, except to say that the former president and his team “often acknowledge these supporters because their enthusiastic support is motivational to us all.”

Instead, Trump has kept things simple in describing the women, as he did at a rally in Columbia, South Carolina earlier this year: “They look so wealthy and beautiful.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.